Complete practical guide
The membership book about seventy-four members and nine survivors
37 chapters and 68 printable worksheets on running a paid community - why the member count hides everything, why nobody tells you they are leaving, and why nine hours of onboarding is worth more than a year of recruiting.
Look inside — read the first chapter freeOne payment, USD. Yours permanently — no subscription.
What this guide is
Rae opened with 74 founding members. Fourteen months later there were 71. By the only number Rae was watching, that was a stable business - a slight dip, nothing that would make anybody investigate. Then Rae sat down with the payment records and a spreadsheet and worked out which 71 they were. Nine. Nine of the original 74 were still there. The other 62 had gone, and been replaced, and the replacements had partly gone too, and the total had held almost perfectly still throughout, because Rae had been recruiting at almost exactly the rate the community was losing people. Not one of the 65 leavers had said why. Most had simply stopped opening things, and then, weeks or months after the decision was actually made, clicked cancel on the day a payment was due. What the nine survivors had in common took about ten minutes to find: every one of them had posted something in their first fourteen days. Of the 65 who left, 51 had never posted at all - not once, in some cases across seven months of paying. They had joined a room made of other people and had never become one of them, and nothing in the business had noticed. In month sixteen Rae spent about nine hours writing a fourteen-day onboarding sequence: seven designed moments, a welcome by name, a reply within the hour, a small win by day three, a direct message on day ten to anybody still silent. Nothing else changed. Over the following two quarters monthly churn fell from 8.4 per cent to 5.0, average tenure went from 11 months to 20, and quarterly recruitment hours fell from about 22 to about 6. The member count over that same year went from 71 to 74. Which is what the most important change in this business looks like from the outside: nothing at all.
What you get out of it
Specifics, not promises.
- Why a flat member count is compatible with any churn rate, and hides which
- The nine hours of onboarding that halve churn while the headline number barely moves
- Why 51 of 65 leavers never posted once - and what to do on day ten
- The cohort table that cannot be built without a field you must start recording today
- Why the higher of two prices produces a better room, not just more money
- What to say to somebody who has gone quiet, and the three words that trigger the cancellation
- Why two points of churn is worth more than doubling the membership
- The eight things that must be true before you take a single payment
- Why zero refunds and zero declines are both warnings rather than achievements
- 148 AI prompts - and the one thing AI must never do in a business made of people
Ideal for
People running or planning a paid community, membership or subscription group - and particularly three groups. Somebody whose member count has been flat for a year and who has concluded the business is stable. Somebody about to recruit their way out of a retention problem. And anybody who has a welcome email and believes it constitutes onboarding.
- Anybody running or planning a paid community, membership or subscription group.
- Somebody whose member count has been flat for a year.
- Somebody about to recruit their way out of a retention problem.
- Anybody who has a welcome email and believes it is onboarding.
What's inside
Format
- Digital download, delivered instantly after payment
- Formatted for letter paper — read on screen or print it
- Yours permanently, re-downloadable from your library any time
- Licensed for use in your own business
By the end you can
A reader finishes with an audience defined as a shared situation rather than a shared topic, tested against whether two members could understand each other in one sentence; a one-sentence promise with a published 'not for' line, sized against their worst month rather than their best; twenty conversations completed before a platform is chosen; a fourteen-day onboarding sequence of seven or eight designed moments, about nine hours to build, with the personal moments explicitly never automated; a founding cohort of roughly twenty recruited by hand and arriving on the same day, told in advance that it will be quiet and asked directly to post in week one; a cohort table carrying join dates from the first month, recording joiners and leavers separately; monthly churn calculated on the start-of-month figure with failed payments held out until they have failed to recover; a price set from hours and ceiling rather than from comparison; and stop conditions - including what closing well would look like - written while nothing was at stake.
A complete working system for building and running a paid membership community - built on four rules covering the fact that the product is other people rather than content, that the promise renews every month and so does the work behind it, that members leave silently weeks after the decision was actually made, and that participation in the first fortnight predicts tenure better than anything else available - with first-fourteen-day participation as the leading indicator, member-months and monthly churn as the commercial ones, and a cohort table and a fourteen-day onboarding sequence as the two documents the business cannot be run honestly without.
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